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Asako I & II (2018)
Directed by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

Thursday, november 14th
7 PM, Globe cinema

Join us for our first Contemporary World Cinema selection of the season, Asako I & II (2018), the latest film from Ryūsuke Hamaguchi. Asako (Erika Karata) is a young woman living in Osaka who falls for an attractive and inscrutable young man named Baku (Masahiro Higashide). A fling ensues, but the relationship terminates on account of Baku’s sudden and mysterious disappearance. Two years later. Asako meets a bland salaryman named Ryôhei who happens to exactly resemble Baku. Slightly creeped out, Asako nonetheless enters into a tenuous romance with the doppelgänger.

This haunting romance competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and its Calgary Premiere not to be missed!

Masters: Abbas Kiarostami

Effortlessly blurring the lines between fiction and reality, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s rich cinematic legacy is showcased through five universally humanistic works.

FOCUS: sexuality

Featuring films from the 1920s up to the 1990s, this globe-spanning series explores how sexuality over the course of the last century has paralleled the development of cinematic language itself.

Spotlight: taiwanese new wave

In the mid 1980s a batch of young Taiwanese filmmakers, including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang, pursued a radical break from the previous stylistic and aesthetic traditions, favouring location shooting, long takes, and deliberate editing to reflect the rapidly changing world around them. Their collective work resulted in of film history’s most influential movements.

Contemporary World Cinema

Meticulously handpicked throughout the year, our Contemporary World Cinema Series brings films fresh off the festival circuit to Calgary. These films would not make it here otherwise, and are often never shown on the big screen again.

Library Screening Series

For the third year in a row, Calgary Cinematheque is excited to present free monthly screenings at the architecturally celebrated new Central Library.

Who Are We?

We are a non-profit film society dedicated to presenting significant, challenging, and essential works of cinema art in Calgary. 

During our season, which runs from October to April, we screen films weekly, in curated programs which situate each film in a thematic and historical context.

We do this because we believe cinema is an essential form of artistic, social, and political expression. Audiences should be able to engage with a wide range of cinematic expression, not only with what is commercially viable. We believe in the power of sharing these experiences with other people in a theatrical setting and we strive to cultivate a community around that experience.

Masters: Jacques Rivette

Most cinema lovers are aware of the cohort of young film critics—among them Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol—who would go on to notoriety as the preeminent figureheads of the French New Wave. Of the young Cahiers du cinéma critics operating under the informal tutelage of André Bazin, it was Jacques Rivette who would, as a filmmaker, take most directly to heart Bazin’s insistence that the cinema might be able to distinguish itself from the theatre most distinctively by repurposing its texts and templates. Rivette’s early criticism excelled at assessing the interrelation between the arts, and he continued as an active filmmaker to believe in cinema as an “impure” form assimilating elements from all those to have preceded it. From the outset presenting a radical break from tradition nevertheless in a constant, exceedingly dynamic dialogue with traditions (on any number of fronts at any given time), the films included in Calgary Cinematheque's Masters: Jacques Rivette series are first and foremost emancipatory collaborations with actresses, seeking to establish methods by way of which theatrical ritual might serve to indulge a return to archaic matriarchal myths, provoking a radical break with the thrust of industrial modernity and its image culture.

Series Films

Paris Belongs To Us (1961)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
Nov 2, 2020

A long and winding tale of theatre, conspiracy, and the Sphinx-like city of Paris herself, Rivette’s debut feature follows Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider), a new arrival to the city who, having innocently attended a conspicuously solemn party, becomes involved with a vast network of people various degrees of shady who may or may not have something to do with what may or may not have been the suicide of somebody named Juan.

FOCUS: Technicolor sERIES

For some considerable time, the industrial and commercial worlds have pursued new gadgets and gimmicks with haste. By the years 1954 and 1955 a tipping point has recently been reached by way of the commercial television and its prevalence within the home, American or otherwise. Hollywood’s talent farm magnates see this as a crisis in need of immediate management. These are the years it is commonly imagined Technicolor took off. Not exactly so. Colour and colourization for the cinema are nearly as old as the form. In the days of early silents: primarily dyes, as with postcards, though with some more involved dye bath processes entering the picture. Before their premier feature film debut as going concern in the field of three-strip colourization, the 1935 RKO-distributed Becky Sharp, the team at Technicolor has been striving inconsistently to achieve its excellence. The secret recipe: red, green, and blue light. Other patents will be subsequently submitted and ultimately stamped, other colour process operations boasting of their three strips, this a new and increasingly available magic. 

Series Films

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? (1957)
Directed by FRANK TASHLIN
sEPT 16, 2021

Famous movie goddess Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield) happens to be back in town with her wisecracking personal assistant (Hollywood legend Joan Blondell). What is it that the public relations flacks have assured Rita Marlowe come to be known for? Why, the lips most kissable, naturally! Rock Hunter sets out to engineer himself a professional coup—in the manner of something not unlike a bull in a china shop.

MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION (1954)
Directed by Douglas Sirk
oCT 14, 2021

Playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) nearly dies in a reckless speedboat accident but is saved by a resuscitator belonging to the widely-beloved Dr. Phillips, who could have used the resuscitator himself, and sadly dies. Having descended into moral tailspin, Merrick meets the painter Randolph, a former acolyte of the deceased Dr. Phillips, and, in his clumsy ardour, eager to perform a solid about-face, shortly thereafter proceeds to harry the poor widow of Dr. Phillips (Jane Wyman) to such an extent that she is struck by an automobile and perhaps permanently blinded.

cARMEN jONES (1955)
Directed by OTTO PREMINGER
OCT 28, 2021

Carmen Jones, both the film and the transplanted archetype for whom it is named, comes on with quite a salvo: If you love me, that’s the end of you. The character of Carmen was introduced in a French novella in the year 1845 and made properly epochal in Georges Bizet’s opera about three decades later.